


Zeitgeist, Poltergeist

by kashinoha



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Bittersweet, Ghost!Len, Season 1 Spoilers, coldwave if you squint, i'm not crying you're crying, not exactly a fix-it, see notes for more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-23 02:34:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11393577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kashinoha/pseuds/kashinoha
Summary: Strange things have been happening aboard theWaverider.But somehow, that’s okay.





	Zeitgeist, Poltergeist

**Author's Note:**

> Whoo guys, it's been a while! Sorry about that. So good news, I have a fic for you. Bad news, this is likely to be my last fic. Real Life reasons: I'm moving to a new city, starting a new job. I've been writing fic for nine years, and it's been a blast. But who knows? I might try to squeeze one in here and there if I can find the time. It definitely won't be for a while, though.
> 
> So for now, this is my final fic. I was playing with some of my WIPS and this just sort of happened of it's own accord (literally; I finished and was like, 'what the fuck did I just write') which is weird because I'm barely in the Legends fandom these days. I like to pretend that most of season two just didn't happen, so this is set some unspecified time after season one. And as we all know in LoT, time can be flexible. Very flexible. 
> 
> This is my goodbye gift to you all who have been so supportive of me over the years!! ♡

 

**Zeitgeist, Poltergeist**

 

All characters © DC Comics

 

 

He likes Sara. She’s sorta like a James Bond, but, y’know, a chick. She talks like a princess and drinks like a sailor. Her hands are tiny but leave the darkest bruises. Sometimes when the sunset light catches it right, her hair looks like fire.

She’s a good guy, if you get the picture.

But Mick’s chary to admit she also gives him the fucking heebie-jeebies, and not because she can do shit with a knife he can’t even pronounce.

It’s just creepy, alright? She’s been shot nine times, stabbed forty-five, and doesn’t have any scars. She keeps odd hours. Animals lose their shit when she walks by. And then there are these times when she looks at you but it sort of feels like she’s looking _through_ you because she was on the other side and that’s gotta _do_ things to a person.

Mick calls her Blondie because it’s a little better than Zombie and now that he’s actually _been_ a zombie he knows that’s not quite right. She might be alive and well, and Mick can bullshit his way through most social cues, but even he picks up that there’s something a little…off about Sara. In a tingly sort of way.

And maybe he’s surprised or maybe he just doesn’t care when Sara knocks on his door at three in the morning. Mick knows it’s her because the others wouldn’t dare wake him up. Y’know. If he’d been sleeping.

If Sara is surprised to discover that Mick sleeps in his workshop she doesn’t show it, and makes herself comfortable on an old crate. She’s wearing a tank top and something silky. Mick rubs the scars along one arm absently because other than the mild bruising from their latest adventures in Iron Age Scotland (‘cause Celts in pelts are apparently Heywood’s favorite thing ever), there is not a mark on her.

“I gotta ask you something, Mick,” she says. She’s looking at the floor with thinned lips like there’s something important written in the cool steel tile.

“Must be pretty serious,” Mick grunts, glancing at the holographic clock on his wall. He hadn’t been asleep yet but he’d been thinking about it. He’s not exactly attracted to Sara, but now that he can kinda see her tits under that silk top pretty soon Mick’s gonna be thinking about something else.

“So…you know how some weird stuff’s been happening on the ship lately?” says Sara.

Mick blinks. “What?”

Sara bites her lip, and if Mick didn’t know any better he’d say she looks _awkward._ Blondie doesn’t look awkward around _anyone,_ so Mick decides this is a ‘boots off the table’ conversation and sits up, mildly interested.

Sara twirls her hand. “You know, things falling over, the odd radiation spikes, stuff going missing…“ Mick gives her a blank look, and she makes a noise in her throat. “You’re _seriously_ telling me you haven’t noticed.”

“Ship gets cold’s the only thing that's weird,” says Mick, shrugging. “Jax better fix the heating around here, or I’m gonna do something about it.” He puts emphasis on the word _do_ like he’s actually going to do anything other than vaguely threaten the kid.

“Mick,” Sara says pointedly, “the heating’s fine. We’ve checked.”

He squints at her. Out of everyone on the team, Sara’s the easiest one to understand. Usually. She’s direct, brief with words, and she doesn’t sugarcoat anything or beat around the bush (because Mick knows metaphors _and_ idioms, fuck you very much). Only now he doesn’t know what the fuck she’s trying to say and it’s starting to get on his nerves.

He reaches for one of the half-empty bottles of beer on his table and says, “You come here in the middle of the night to tell me what, exactly? The ship’s broken?” She’s staring at him all funny, so he snorts. “What makes you think _I_ can do something about that?” He takes a swig from the bottle, grimacing at the stale, flat taste.

“Because it’s not the ship,” Sara says quietly.

Mick swallows. “Okay, you’ve lost me,” he says.

“You guys know that I was…”Sara trails off for a minute, fingers coming to ghost over a spot on her torso. “Let’s just say that being dead has offered me a unique perspective.”

Yawning, Mick props his boots back up on his worktable. “English, Blondie.”

Sara stares off into the far corner of the room for a minute before she replies. “Ever since coming back, it’s been different. I’ve been able to sort of, well,” she swallows, “see things. Sense things. Like, auras, or the weather, or if somebody’s watching you.” She smiles ruefully. “Hippie shit.”

 “Sooo… you’re saying there’s something on the ship?” asks Mick, raising an eyebrow.

“At first I wasn’t sure, but,” Sara nods, “yeah.”

Mick raises the other eyebrow. Sure, he’s crap at reading social cues, but when it comes to giving them he’s not exactly subtle. Sara seems to be staring at something in the room that Mick can’t see, so he waves a hello at her to catch her attention. “And?”

Sara turns back to him and in the LED lights her face suddenly looks very open, very lost. “And I think…” she says, “okay this might sound weird, but I think…it’s Leonard.”

Of all the things she could have said, Mick sure hadn’t been expecting _that._ Although he shoulda known when she’d said hippie shit. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“At first I thought it might have been a time remnant, or something,” replies Sara, leaning in, “but something on this ship is trying to tell us something.”

“So you think it’s Snart,” says Mick, scowling. He takes another stale swallow of beer because it’s three in the goddamn morning and he really doesn’t need this assfuckery right now.

Sara makes a face and says, “I can’t see him, but somehow I just _know,_ okay?”

“And here I thought _I_ was ten different kinds of crazy,” Mick remarks.

“You know what,” Sara says flatly, hopping off the crate, “forget it.” She shakes her head. “Get some sleep.”

“What do you think I was doing before?” Mick grumbles, rubbing an eye for emphasis. 

Sara’s eyes flicker over him and she says, “Sure, Mick,” lip curling up like she knows it is a lie.

Mick looks down at himself after she’s gone and sighs. Hard to be convincing when you still have your gloves and boots on.

 

 

 

After that Mick does start to pay attention, and okay, maybe there’s a _little_ something funky going on with the ship. Something that’s not Hunter’s fucking mutated salmon in the fridge. Mostly lights flickering and things randomly falling off shelves and shit. And then there was that bit with Hunter’s old radio suddenly turning itself on and only playing _Piano Man_ on a loop. But they’ve fucked up enough timelines that that could be _anything,_ right?

“Okay, don’t kill me,” Haircut announces to him one morning, “but I can’t find the jacket.”

Mick sighs and puts down his cruller. “What jacket.”

Haircut rubs the back of his neck uncomfortably. “The, uh,” He clears his throat. “Um. Snart’s jacket.”

“If you lost it I’m gonna burn you,” Mick says casually. He takes a bite of his cruller and watches Haircut squirm.

“Hey, don’t look at me! It’s been hanging up in the storage room, and when I went in yesterday to get a rotating screw to fix my suit’s radiograph it was just gone…”

Mick stuffs the rest of the cruller into his mouth and wordlessly pats the heat gun at his side. Haircut gets the picture and makes himself scarce with a small choking sound when he realizes that Mick has the safety off. Mick grins, thin-lipped and humorless. If Haircut or anyone else had even bothered to notice, they would have seen that the safety’s always off these days.

It’s not like he actually wants the jacket. Wouldn’t fit him, anyway. But it’s sort of a symbolic thing. Like a Rothko, for example (yeah, he knows art too, shut up). Nothing special about it, but it’s not really about the _painting._

When he finds the jacket in his room later, draped over his favorite chair, Mick just assumes Haircut got his shit together. Nothing more.

 

 

 

Mick makes the mistake of mentioning it when the cold gun suddenly powers itself up with a _whirr_ like a winter breeze. Yeah, he might have kept it. Never know when someone might need their balls frozen off.

“Delusional,” the professor says like he’s never lost anyone and imagined they were still there.

“Drunk,” Heywood says like it’s a cause, not a symptom.

“Grieving,” Amaya says like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. To her, it probably is. The _Waverider’s_ inhabitants aren’t exactly known for their emotional intelligence, and Amaya is still new to their team of misfits. Mick bares his teeth, but Amaya doesn’t seem worried. Clouds are big and looming and sometimes the color of stone, but they cannot push you over.

They are just tear droplets, after all.

The cold gun stays on for a while.

 

 

 

When Gideon suddenly throws “Alexa” into a sentence one day things turn from “Hippie Shit” to “Something is Seriously Fucked Around Here.” Mostly for Mick.

So when they’re not saving history from itself there’s a bit of quiet ghost hunting going on. Last week they pull Christopher Columbus out of a dive bar that’s on fire (since apparently the pioneer of the New World can't put his ass-kicking where his shit-talking is), and Hunter accuses Mick of stealing some French Versailles silverware that Mick definitely did not steal (because embroidered swans are not really his thing, but sapphires were kind of Len’s and it’s all the more confusing when the little forks show up in Mick’s box of leftovers). On Tuesday they convince NASA to go to the moon, mainly to prove that it isn’t a giant hunk of cheese, and the _Waverider_ develops odd cold spots in some of the rooms. This is Mick’s life right now.

He finds himself drunkenly inspecting the chillier rooms with hot breath pluming out in front of him, refusing to talk to thin air because that would mean that he actually _believes._ This could all just be part of a prank war between Haircut and Nate. It’s happened before. But then again, Mick’s on a giant metal spaceship and yesterday eighty million years ago there were dinosaurs, so. Case in point.

Mick brings up mice when more stuff goes missing, and Hunter’s jaw clenches in that way that meant he was highly offended, but in a British way. “Mice,” he scoffs, as if the _Waverider_ could be privy to such vermin (Mick smirks, because he knows the _Waverider_ has _much_ worse).

Also, the ring keeps turning up in odd places. Mick doesn’t want to wear it yet, because all this spirit stuff is a plan just like any other and if he wears it, it means that this whole thing that he's definitely not calling hope could fall apart just like that.

Maybe without burns this time, save those around his heart.

 

 

 

It’s like the Big Guy in the Sky, or as some people in the future called it, the Oculus, has been replaced with a group of spaced-out fucked-up wannabes who don’t give a flying fuck about continuity or where you came from or who’s been in your heart.

Oh wait, that’s them. Mostly. But not this. Because there’s coincidence, and then there’s Doctor Who on LSD. The _Waverider_ has a spirit that may or may not be Snart. That’s just good, great, peachy.

Mick wonders if all of his time remnants are as fortunate. Twenty billion versions of him, and somehow he’s sure they are all equally fucked.

The monitor closest to him beeps in response, which is odd because the ship’s currently offline for repairs.

 

 

 

Later, Mick decides to ask Hunter’s AI. Gideon’s an ass, but at least she’s an honest ass.

“Uh,” Mick clears his throat. “Gideon…”

_“How can I assist you, Mister Rory?”_

Mick knows no one can see him, but he still feels like a colossal ass standing in the middle of the room with nothing to do so he shoves his hands into his pockets and plays with a string of lint there, which is only a little better. “Any signs of him?” he asks.

_“By ‘him,’ are you referring to Leonard Snart?”_

Mick rubs his face. “Mm.”

 _“Leonard Snart is deceased, Mister Rory,”_ says Gideon. Maybe it’s his imagination (wouldn't be the first time), but Mick thinks she sounds sad. Which is about as likely as the moon being made out of Gruyère, but it’s somewhat comforting to imagine.

“Nobody stays dead for long around here,” Mick replies.

_“But since he is, I must conclude that it is physically impossible for Mister Snart to board this ship.”_

“What about—“he clears his throat again and says softer, “spiritually?” God, he feels like an idiot.

 _“If you are referring to ghosts, Mister Rory, then I am afraid I cannot help you. However, I might suggest consulting a physician,”_ Gideon tells him.

“I can reprogram you, you know,” Mick says. “I still remember how.”

Gideon does not answer.

 

 

 

It’s after space dinner later that week when Sara pulls Mick into her quarters with that look that usually means someone’s either going to get killed or screwed, and shows him the cards. Mick would have preferred a beating. But the universe doesn’t let him off that easy, he thinks with a grimace, as he stares at the playing cards that have arranged themselves into a pattern on Sara’s bed.

“It’s the last game we played,” Sara says quietly. “He was winning.”

“You wouldn’t be showing me this crap if you did it yourself, right?” Mick asks, just to be sure.

She smacks him on the arm.

“So what are you gonna do about it?” says Mick, rubbing his bicep. The question throws Blondie for a loop and she just kinda stares at the hand on the bed until Mick can’t take it anymore and leaves. Drinking himself number than the nerve damage on his burnt arms isn’t going to help much this time.

He shuts the door to his workshop, yanking his gun from its holster and slamming it down on the table. The sound is loud and harsh in the ship's silence. Mick pulls in a deep breath through his nose and lets it out through his mouth. Hell, he can’t believe he’s about to do this.

“Snart?”

He circles the room like it’s a bank at midnight, boots nimble and rhythmic in the quiet.

“You there?”

Nothing. Mick’s shoulders slump and he makes a frustrated noise. Like he expected an answer.

 _Maybe part of you did?_ A voice in his mind whispers. It sounds a little like Lisa.

“Always the same,” Mick bites out. He’s had enough of this bullshit. Prank war or not, he needs to know. “Showing off with your little card tricks and gimmicks, but when it’s time to bring out the big guns, you just don’t have the _balls.”_

The lights flicker. Mick didn’t think it was possible for flickering lights to seem annoyed. Even so. The lights flicker again, and a thought comes to him.

“…Or maybe you can’t,” he says slowly. It's not like spirits have a rulebook or anything he can go by.

It is entirely possible Mick is having a conversation with his empty room. Yet there’s a need to know, not unlike the hunger for a flame beneath his skin. Mick rubs a spot behind his ear and mutters, “I feel fucking stupid, Snart. At least show me you’re listening.”

The cold gun not only powers on by itself, but shoots a small, concentrated blast at the wall five feet from him, and suddenly Mick can’t breathe.

“…Lenny…”

There’s a tiny mark on the wall, smoking lazily with nitrogen. Unlike Haircut or the professor, Mick doesn’t care about the How’s or the Why’s. He’d probably punch anybody right now who tried to give him an explanation because it doesn’t matter, even if he can’t see Len or Len can’t talk because he’s dead but he’s fucking _there,_ and that makes all the difference.

Mick’s legs buckle and he sits down in the nearest chair, hard. “Fuck,” he says, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Fuck,” he says again. He doesn’t know what else to say. He doesn’t know what he’s _feeling._

It’s not like it’s _actually_ Len, standing there with narrowed cat-eyes and curly sneer that betrays just how many steps ahead he always is. Was. Well. What Mick means is that it’s definitely him, but not all the way. Not in the warm, blood-pumping, too-much-beard-stubbly way that Mick is (he’s not good with words, okay, and time travel does absolutely jack to help that since it just makes everything _more_ complicated).

Mick doesn’t know how long he sits there, his hands covering his eyes, until a soft whirring brings him back to himself. The cold gun’s tick-tick-ticking, like it does when it’s ready to fire (they had never known why it did that, and they couldn’t exactly ask Cisco). It is supposed to be a threatening sound, but to Mick, there is something comforting about it.

“I’m fine,” he grunts out, and finds that it’s true.

And that’s it, really. There’s no big climactic thing that happens, Len doesn’t write REDRUM on the wall, there’s no tree branch-finger voice whispering in Mick’s ear at nights. Part of him was blown to bits, and part of him stayed. That’s all.

Life goes on with the dead.

Mick watches the new _Ghostbusters_ with Haircut and thanks God there is not a slime factor in real life. He talks to himself more after that, whenever he’s alone, because he knows he’s sometimes not. It might not be Len in the way Mick wants him, but he’ll take what he can get because even Mick realizes how fucking lucky he is.

He had a point with Gideon. Nobody stays dead for long on the _Waverider._ The course of nature, the way things are supposed to be, that’s like the sand that falls through an hourglass and they’re just the grains that get stuck in-between.

Only now, Mick thinks as he flops into bed—yes an actual bed this time, fuck you—and the candles he keeps on the table ignite by themselves, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

“What do you think, Lenny?” he mumbles into his pillow. “Wanna kill everyone on this ship and lay low in that place in Freeport you always liked?” He’s not shit-faced drunk anymore, which he honestly might have preferred to the day they spent traipsing around the Hill of Tara at an Imbolc ritual gone wrong (don’t ask), just exhausted. Even his Irish ass couldn’t take that.

“We could put the Rothko over the fireplace. The Santinis wouldn’t mind, ‘cause we’d kick ‘em out.”

Something on the ship groans in response. Mick’s not too tired to miss the little reproachful echo in the pipes. He closes his eyes and smiles. “S’ppose you’re right.”

So, spirits and shit. Mick says he doesn’t care how it’s happened, but it does make him philosophize. In a very Mick-like way, which involves watching things smoke with a Resting Murder Face. It creeps the hell out of Jax, who often sneaks into the galley for a late-night snack to find Mick playing with the stove burners.

One time Sara brings up an old Zen koan, _What did your face look like before your parents were born?_ It was never meant to be answered literally, but sometimes they do, in the times before Pac-Man and iPhones and Donald Trump when Mick occasionally wonders about their time remnants. He’s met several different versions of Leonard. Or maybe they’d been the same Leonard who’d met different versions of him. Huh. Blame Blondie for the existential mindfuckery. Mick’s got a ghost in his room and _she’s_ somehow more confusing. Figures.

They've all accepted that sometimes weird shit happens on board, and also that there's no point in trying to figure it out because when you've got paradoxes and pirates and literal Groundhog Day that one time, something falling off a shelf hardly takes precedence. Only Sara and Mick know who's really there. Mick admits sometimes it's kind of funny.

“I thought I fixed the temperature controls on this stupid ship,” Jax grumbles one day when they come back from Central City and the console room is fucking polar bears wearing jackets _freezing._ Sara gives Mick a meaningful look and Mick only shrugs. The cold never bo—wait, no, motherfucker. That’s from that movie that Heywood quotes all the time. It’s true, though. Mick doesn’t mind (the cold, not Heywood’s pop culture fanboy spew).

“Is anybody else bothered that my things keep going missing?” asks Hunter, annoyed one day when the velvet fez he purchased in Cyprus is mercifully misplaced.

(His sapphire swan silverware lies tucked into a pair of boxers in Mick’s bottom drawer. Alongside two volumes of an art history encyclopedia, a geode paperweight, and a bag of jelly beans that Mick swears he didn’t nick, because really he didn’t.)

Len likes to mess with the ship’s gamma sensors. For fun, of course. The professor straightens his glasses on these days, vexed, and Mick snorts. He knows the answers for once. Or at least he hopes he does, otherwise all of them ‘cept the professor and Jax are very much fucked on a cellular level.

When Jax’s iPod switches on the only mystery is why it only blasts Madonna and “Play That Funky Music White Boy” (“Are Eye-plots supposed to do that?” Amaya Jiwe wonders, and Mick offers a feral grin 'cause those songs were always on at Saints and Sinners and Len is actually a giant ham).

So appliances turning on for him is a thing now. Or off, if Len thinks Mick shouldn’t be using something (which has resulted in several arguments with thin air and Gideon’s subsequent inquiries as to how much alcohol Mick has consumed).

When he _does_ drink, Mick wonders what makes ghosts. There have been stories older than time, of people coming back from the dead for various reasons to fuck around (sometimes literally), and in all those hundreds of thousands of stories Mick never once hears _how_ they become ghosts in the first place. Now that the _Waverider_ has its own brand of poltergeist, Mick discovers that all those authors and bards never said because they never needed to. He’s got an idea.

He thinks maybe it’s love.

The jacket and cold gun sit draped over his workbench where he can see them when he wakes up in the morning. The heat gun is similarly on the table with its nose facing the door.

The safety’s on.

 

 

 

Mick borrows Sara’s cards one day and plays Spades on a storage room crate even though he’s a steaming pile of crap at cards. Len’s always liked 'em, and Mick’s sworn on his matches that he will never touch chess as long as he lives. Except to _maybe_ steal the gold pieces Hunter has in his study. He may be strangely artistic about some things, but hey, even Mick has taste.

Sometimes they play good old War like Len sometimes did with Lisa on rainy days, and Mick likes that one because it’s kinda like a dick-measuring contest for playing cards (and also because War is the only game that Mick even remotely has a shot at winning).

Mick watches the pile of cards across from him grow of its own accord, a little sad even though Len’s clearly beating him. War has casualties, and he doesn’t mention that in the long run, Mick’s always won.

He's gotten better at understanding Len's non-verbal way of communicating. No Ouija board required. Changes in the lighting mean Len's expressing an opinion. Thermostat shit's when he's upset or pissed off. Appliances are mostly just Len fucking with people, but with Mick it's his way of ordering him around (“Whaddya mean, I need to wash it,” Mick grumbles when the faucet turns on just as he's about to bite into a peach). Items missing or replaced usually tell Mick he's amused, and floating or falling stuff signals more intense emotions. Mick finds he has to be more open about things too in order to get it. It's a long way's away from their old, “We don't express ourselves because we're men,” and Mick's still learning.

“Lisa works with the Flash sometimes,” he admits one day in December (year unknown), and is surprised when nothing in the room knocks over in a rage. He’s been keeping Len updated on everybody—not because he can’t let go or anything, but because for the giant bastard Len was, he deserves so, so much better than what he got.

And okay, maybe it isn’t so surprising that Lenny’s cool with it. Hah, cool. But damn, they aren’t the people they used to be.

“Yeah, I know,” Mick replies, snorting. “CCPD nearly shat themselves. Playing both sides? That's a real Snart thing to do, seems like.”

The flickering lights seem to say _You too,_ and Mick can hardly argue with that. Maybe that's what makes them people instead of pawns. It's kind of nice, though Mick will never admit that out loud.

“She's gonna be fine,” he assures the room.

On those nights when Mick stares into the smoke he thinks it’s alright to be stuck in the sandglass, where you can be gone a thousand years and at the same time never born. Each half can be the top or the bottom, depending on which way you turn the glass. Though, when it comes down to it, it doesn’t really matter much. Doesn't mean you have to be trapped. Sometimes the only thing stuck for them on the _Waverider_ is time.

Len’s ring winks at Mick in the crackling firelight, reminding him now of something other than failed plans, reminding him that nothing is ever lost.

Things always come back.

Mick smiles and tucks the ring into his pocket. Hm. Maybe that’s why they call life a circle.

 

 

_End._

 


End file.
